ICDAR2017 Competition on the Classification of Medieval Handwritings in Latin Script

The proposed competition is the second round of the Competition on the Classification of Medieval Handwritings in Latin Script. The first round was organized at ICFHR 2016 [1]. It was followed by a reflexive seminar gathering researchers in Humanities and Computer Science to analyze the result[2].

Tasks under evaluation

The tasks to be evaluated in the present competition is the classification of 3000 images of Latin Scripts, from handwritten books dated 500 C.E. to 1600 C.E. A similar competition was organized for ICFHR2016 and provides the training data-set and a preliminary benchmark.
The organizers provide a data-set consisting of 5000 images with annotation of script types. They will evaluate the results on a 3000 additional images which are not included in the training data-set.
We propose four possible tasks:
– Task 1: Style classification
– Task 2: Style classification on heterogeneously encoded data
– Task 3: Manuscript dating
– Task 4: Manuscript dating on heterogeneously encoded data
All tasks are divided in two steps:
1) The participants will have to provide a normalized “distance matrix” between pairs of images
2) The participants will have to provide a normalized multi-weighted labeling to each image, that is a “belonging matrix”describing the degree to which each image is associated with a particular label
Participants are expected to provide the CSV-files according to the format that is described in section 2. There are 12 pre-defined classes according to the script style and 15 pre-defined classes according to the date.

More info:

CLaMM and HDRC-IR

This site presents the CLaMM (Classification of Latin Medieval Manuscripts) corpus, which is the basis for the Competitions on the Classification of Medieval Handwritings in Latin Script, jointly organized by Computer Scientists and Humanists (paleographers) at ICFHR2016 and ICDAR2017, and hosts the new HDRC-IR Image Retrieval for Historical Handwritten Documents competition at ICDAR2019.
It provides access to a rich database of European medieval manuscripts to the community on Handwriting Analysis and Recognition.
Keywords- Historical documents; Image classification;
Feature extraction;